Suicide bombing a reaction to occupation
- From: "Karl" <karlpet@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 19 Jul 2005 09:30:35 -0700
What makes someone desperate enough to blow themselves up? A
comprehensive study shows it is the pain, loss and humiliation of
occupation by a foreign power.
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1121723410866&call_pageid=968256290204&col=968350116795
Bush barking up wrong tree on terror
Who carried out the London massacre, we do not know. But, as to why
they did it, Americans are already quarrelling.
President George Bush says the terrorists are attacking our
civilization. At Fort Bragg, N.C., he explained again why we are
fighting in Iraq, two years after we overthrew Saddam Hussein. "Iraq is
the latest battlefield in this war," he said, in "a global war on
terror.
"Many terrorists who kill ... on the streets of Baghdad are followers
of the same murderous ideology that took the lives of citizens in New
York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. There is only one course of action
against them: to defeat them abroad before they attack us at home."
We fight the terrorists over there so we do not have to fight them over
here. But is this true?
Few Americans have given more thought to the motivation of suicide
bombers than Robert Pape, author of Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic
of Suicide Terrorism. His book is drawn from a database on every
suicide-bomb attack from 1980 to early 2004. Conclusion: The claim that
9/11 and the suicide bombings in Iraq are done to advance some jihad by
"Islamofascists" against the West is not only unsubstantiated, it is
hollow.
"Islamic fundamentalism is not as closely associated with suicide
terrorism as many people think," Pape tells The American Conservative
in its July 18 issue. Indeed, the world's leader in suicide terror was
the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka. This secular Marxist group "invented the
famous suicide vest for their suicide assassination of Rajiv Ghandi in
May 1991. The Palestinians got the idea of the vest from the Tamil
Tigers."
But if the aim of suicide bombers is not to advance Islamism in a war
of civilizations, what is its purpose? Pape's conclusion:
"(S)uicide-terrorist attacks are not so much driven by religion as by a
clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw
military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their
homeland. From Lebanon to Sri Lanka to Chechnya to Kashmir to the West
Bank, every major suicide terrorist campaign has had as its central
objective to compel a democratic state to withdraw."
The 9/11 terrorists were over here because we were over there. They are
not trying to convert us. They are killing us to drive us out of their
countries.
Before the U.S. invasion, says Pape, "Iraq never had a suicide attack
in its history. Since our invasion, suicide terrorism has been
escalating rapidly, with 20 attacks in 2003, 48 in 2004 and (more than)
50 in just the first five months of 2005. Every year since the U.S.
invasion, suicide terrorism has doubled ... Far from making us safer
against terrorism, the operation in Iraq has stimulated suicide
terrorists and has given suicide terrorism a new lease on life."
Pape is saying that Bush has got it backward: The Iraq war is not
eradicating terrorism, it is creating terrorists.
The good news? "The history of the last 20 years" shows that once the
troops of the occupying democracies "withdraw from the homeland of the
terrorists, they often stop - and stop on a dime."
Between 1982 and 1986, there were 41 suicide-bomb attacks on U.S.,
French, and Israeli targets in Lebanon. When U.S. and French troops
withdrew and Israel pulled back to a six-mile buffer zone, suicide
bombings virtually ceased.
"Since suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation and
not Islamic fundamentalism," says Pape, "the use of heavy military
force to transform Muslim societies ... is only likely to increase the
number of suicide terrorists coming at us."
What Pape is saying is that the neo-cons' "World War IV" - our
invading Islamic countries to overthrow regimes and convert them into
democracies - is suicidal, like stomping on an anthill so as not to
be bitten by ants. It is the presence of U.S. troops in Islamic lands
that is the progenitor of suicide terrorism.
Bush's cure for terrorism is a cause of the epidemic. The doctor is
spreading the disease.
The longer we stay in Iraq, the greater the number of suicide attacks
we can expect. The sooner we get our troops out, the sooner terrorism
over there and over here will end. So, Pape says, the data prove.
This is the precise opposite of what Bush argues and believes.
.
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